France Censors Anti-Abortion Advocates

By John Semmens — Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent NewsThe award-winning “Dear Future Mom” video featuring children with Down Syndrome making the case for the value of their lives was banned from TV by France’s Conseil d’État (State Council). According to the Council, the video was deemed “too insensitive” since it was “likely to trouble the consciences of women who had made different personal life choices” (i.e., had aborted babies predicted to have Down Syndrome).Council spokesman Henri Abattage defended the ban, maintaining that “our decision is in keeping with public perceptions of what is right. There's a reason why 90 percent of the pregnancies afflicted with this syndrome end in abortion. Why should the minority who object to this medical intervention be permitted to discomfit the vast majority who approve of it? Television is a medium that ought to confirm widely held values, not disrupt them with contrary opinions, especially those that may cause psychological distress.”Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, former president of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, said he was “saddened but not surprised” by the ban. “First of all, a diagnosis establishes only a probability, not a certainty, that the child will have the syndrome. Many completely normal babies are killed by a hasty resort to abortion. Second, as the video clearly demonstrates, many of the afflicted are adorable and loving individuals whose right to live ought not to be callously dismissed. I encourage all members of every society to view this video.”“Bishops can encourage all they want, but the Council will not neglect is duty to insulate the general public from offensive presentations of idiosyncratic perspectives,” Abattage promised. “There are boundaries that must not be crossed. This is one of them.”TV isn't the only avenue being closed off for communicating ideas out-of-sync with the culture of abortion. The French Parliament also enacted a ban on web site publication of messages that “discourage recourse to abortion.” Member of Parliament Rene Escargot explained that “the days when anti-social notions can intrude on people's consciousness are over. Anyone attempting to dissuade a woman from exercising her inalienable right to obtain an abortion can and will be suppressed. It is the will of the majority.” Group Says OSU Terrorist “Wrongly Shot”The Ohio State University Coalition for Black Liberation held a rally to protest racist cops' shooting black men. One of the “wrongly shot” individuals was Abdul Razak Ali Artan who ran over some students with his automobile and went on a rampage stabbing others until he was shot by campus police.One of the rally's spokespersons, Maryam Abidi characterized the shooting as “a disproportionate response. Artan was only armed with a knife. There was no call for police to escalate to the use of firearms.” Abidi called the claim that the shooting was necessary to save the lives of others who might have been stabbed “a self-serving and tired excuse for police brutality. Whether Artan was a threat to others is irrelevant. He was still a human being entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The appropriate law enforcement response would have been a non-lethal apprehension followed by a fair trial.” What constitutes a “fair trial” may have been illustrated by Above the Law Elie Mystal editor's recommendation that black jurors should vote to acquit all non-white defendants accused of crimes against white victims. “I see it as a balancing out of the injustice inflicted on blacks accused of crimes against whites during the Jim Crow era,” Mystal said. “Will it mean exonerating some guilty men? Sure, but that will be payback for all the innocent blacks railroaded by racist juries across America for centuries.”As it turns out, Artan posted a rant against the oppression of Muslims on his Facebook page prior to his violent attack on his fellow students. In the rant he cited the looks he feared he would get from other students if he tried to follow Islam's daily calls to prayer, saying that “this would intrude on my right as a Muslim to receive the respect from unbelievers which the Quran commands. My only honorable course is to kill as many of them as I can before I am martyred for Allah.”Despite the Facebook evidence, Associate Professor Pranav Jani lamented that “since the perpetrator was killed we may never understand why he lashed out like he did.” This sentiment paralleled Ohio Governor John Kasich's fear that “we may never know the motive behind this unfortunate event.”In related news, the Church of the Holy Trinity in Kristianstad, Sweden took pity on a group of Muslim refugees and invited them to make themselves a home on church property. Church officials were distressed to find feces and puddles of urine in the back pews of the chapel. In addition to not being housebroken, some of the men terrorized parishioners by screaming Islamic chants during church services, behaving inappropriately in front of young women in the church, climbing on the organ pipes, and, in one instance, trying to kidnap a baby about to be baptized. Unapologetic refugee Ibn Baddas proclaimed “all the world is for Allah and his believers. We should kill these kaffirs for trespassing on land belonging to Islam, but we are merciful.”Obama Orders Review of Election InterferencePresident Obama ordered federal intelligence agencies to prepare a report on Russian cyber attacks that interfered with the 2016 election outcome and deliver it to him before January 20, 2017, “so I may take whatever action is required to restore integrity to the democratic process.”Homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco called the investigation “crucial to the president's decision on whether he may need to vacate the reported outcome. Rather than let the country to be locked-into accepting a new president illegitimately installed by the dirty tricks of a foreign government, the president needs the information necessary to support his continuation in office until a fair election process can determine a successor.”“A concomitant concern is what sort of counterattack we may need to launch against the Russians for what would clearly be an act of war on their part,” Monaco added. “Putin may think his operatives have been clever enough to not have left a trace of a clue confirming their hostile intervention, but if, in the judgment of our experts, the conclusion is firm that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the President is determined to strike back.”Monaco insisted that “Trump's assertion that the idea that Russia was involved and that thoughts of retaliation against them are 'crazy ideas,' heightens our suspicion that he may have been an active participant in their nefarious scheme to rig the outcome. His pre-election day contention that the process was rigged may have been a Freudian slip that tends to confirm to his complicity.”Expenditures by the Trump and Clinton campaigns were also cited as “a virtual smoking gun” by Monaco. “In the end, Clinton outspent Trump by $565 million to $322 million. This plus the almost unanimous support from media outlets for Secretary Clinton argue that Trump's apparent win must be regarded as highly improbable. Thankfully, President Obama is taking the unprecedented measures needed to protect the nation.” In related news, recently defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton publicly urged Congress “to take steps to stamp out the epidemic of malicious fake news before it destroys the country. A deluge of false stories and outright lies enabled an unfit poser to eke out an apparent Electoral College majority over many say was the most qualified person to ever seek the presidency. Though efforts are currently underway to avert this travesty, it is also imperative that laws be changed to ensure that news be properly vetted by recognized and qualified journalists before it can be released to the public on any media platform.” Clinton Campaign Tried to Silence Friendly VoiceWhile the official meme promoted by the left-stream media is that President-Elect Donald Trump is a threat to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, a story reported by MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski points in the opposite direction.The co-host of the cable news network's “Morning Joe” program related a pre-election day incident in which an irate Hillary Clinton campaign official contacted MSNBC executives demanding that she be punished for criticizing the candidate's “taking the election for granted.”“The thing is, I was worried that Hillary might lose the election and was trying to help her make a small course correction,” Brzezinski said. “This was around the same time that all the polls were showing her with a big lead. I thought the Clinton campaign was acting like the whole thing was already over and they could just coast to an easy win. I was giving them friendly advice. I didn't think I did anything wrong. Yet, here they were calling for my head. The painful irony is that her arrogance may have been a factor in her losing to Donald Trump.”In related news, the Dutch establishment's efforts to stifle Geert Wilders—the leader of the right-wing Party for Freedom—may not work out as well as they hope. This week a Dutch court found Wilders guilty of “inciting racial hatred” when he asked attendees at a 2014 political rally whether they wanted “more or fewer Moroccans to be admitted into the Netherlands.” The court declined the prosecutor's demand that Wilders be fined €5,000 and held that “conviction alone should be sufficient shame to drive Mr. Wilders out of politics.”Like the United States' Donald Trump, though, Wilders has been riding vocal criticism of unrestrained immigration to electoral success. The notoriety he has gained for speaking out on this issue now has his Party leading in the polls for next year's scheduled elections.A Satirical Look at Recent NewsJohn Semmens is a retired economist who has written a weekly political satire for The Arizona Conservative since 2005. He says working on his satires is one of the ways he tries to honor the liberties our Founding Fathers tried to protect. Please do us a favor. If you use material created by The Arizona Conservative, give us credit and DO NOT change the context. Thank you.